Blog Post

Fibre has taken the internet market by storm over the last few years and has become the hottest commodity for businesses and home-internet users alike. Despite the hype around getting fibre, the actual ordering and installation process often leaves customers with the urge to pull out their hair and scream. Why does the process take so long anyhow?

OrderingYou’re ready to get fibre to your home or business, you sign the paperwork and now it should go live right? No. Once you have signed the paperwork, these are processed by the relevant ISP sales consultant and passed through to the projects team pending site survey scheduling. The site survey is scheduled with the upstream Layer-2 fibre provider who is in charge of the trenching and installation of the fibre service.

Site SurveyThe waiting list for scheduling of site surveys can often be a drag, with customers waiting up to two months or more for a site survey due to the long list of customers who ordered before them. With there only being a few layer-2 providers such as DFA, Openserve and so forth, these companies are often inundated with thousands of fibre requests a month to get through causing a bit of a back-log.

Project DocumentsOnce the site survey has been done, the Layer-2 provider drafts project documents with visuals of the routes that the fibre will take from the node to your server cabinet. The provider then waits for you, the customer, to sign off these documents and send it back to them before taking any next steps.

WayleavesOnce all the documentation is out the way, the provider applies for wayleaves with the local municipal, documenting the routes they intend on taking to get from the node to your site. The municipal is also inundated with these requests and thus requests can often take quite some time to be approved. In addition to a large workload, there are a lot of factors that come into play such as piping in the ground, that can affect the time it takes for plans to be approved.

TrenchingOnce the wayleaves are approved, trenching is scheduled with a civils contractor where yet another wait takes place due to the thousands of fibre trenches being scheduled in the city or town that is keeping them busy. Once the day arrives, the project can take up to 2 weeks or more to complete depending on various technicalities.

HandoverOnce trenching is completed and the fibre has been pulled into your server cabinet, the layer-2 provider will come and install a fibre router used to connect your fibre to their network. Once this has taken place, the layer-2 provider hands over the fibre along with IP’s to the ISP which can take a week to two weeks. Once the IP’s are received the ISP implements their own on-premise device and fibre is activated.

With this complex project process, it is easy to understand why fibre can take anything from three to twelve months, depending on the application. As a service provider, ESA aims to provide our customers with a great service and as such, we ensure that we provide you with an interim connectivity, capable of handling both your voice and your data to ensure that your new system is running long before your fibre goes live